Narrative

These drawings are based on a real story that happened in October 1998, when Erez, a 31-year-old convicted drug felon, moved to Amsterdam to set up an Ecstasy distribution network.

The offer was spread in quiet conversations among young Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn and Monsey, N.Y. They'd get $1,500 and a round-trip ticket to Europe if they were willing to carry back suitcases full of diamonds. About a dozen said yes. But it wasn't diamonds they were smuggling. It was Ecstasy. And these Hasidic Jews--most of whom still prayed morning, noon and night, and some who wouldn't travel carrying their contraband load on Saturday because it was the Sabbath helped bring almost a million tablets of the illegal drug into the U.S. in less than a year.